As defined by the International Telecommunication Union in ITU-T Recommendation Y.2060 dated June 2012, the “Internet of Things” (IoT) is a global infrastructure for the information society, enabling advanced services by interconnecting (physical and virtual) things based on existing and evolving interoperable information and communication technologies.
For example, in a typical IoT deployment, there are a large amount of electronically interconnected devices with different capabilities. The IoT devices can form a heterogeneous ad-hoc network wherein diverse devices such as, for example, sensors, actuators, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, and smartphones, interact with each other to achieve a common goal. However, a major challenge is how to coordinate these distributed and diverse devices with no or very little underlying infrastructure support.